My thoughts on education and life in general

The Race is On

Sep 2, 2009

In the summer of 2004, right before the presidential elections, my Austrian professor in Applied Statistics proposed to do a survey on the voting behavior of the UP student population. We asked around 400+ students of UP Diliman, our sample size proportional to the population of each of the UP units. Maybe the Institute of Mathematics kept a copy of that work. I have my own copy of that report back home. We didn’t just ask who will they elect as president. We also asked other questions to look at the type of people who chose a particular candidate. We also asked them to justify why they chose to vote for a particular candidate.

We had to overhaul our survey forms after conducting the preliminary survey. Why? One of the reasons that surfaced in our interviews is that they did not want FPJ to win the elections. Even my professor did not anticipate that response. And since quite a lot of people included that reason for choosing a new president, we were forced to add that option in our survey forms. Imagine that. One of the reasons for voting a particular candidate is that they did not want this particular candidate to win.

Let me just summarize what our class discovered on that survey. There were 5 candidates at that time: Arroyo, Poe, Lacson, Roco and Villanueva. According to the UP voting population, around 40% chose Roco, another 40% chose Arroyo. Lacson is slightly ahead of Villanueva (I already forgot the numbers), while Poe only managed to get the vote of less than 5% of the UP population. Bottomline: For UP students, Roco is tied with Arroyo.

I was hopeful at that time, I voted for Roco. I refused to put my vote on Arroyo just because I didn’t want FPJ to win. So even if Roco placed 4th on the SWS surveys, even if it was clear that it would take a miracle for him to win the elections, I still voted for Roco.

Well, we all know what happened after that.

Here we go again, another round of presidential elections for 2010. With Erap’s announcement that he would run again if the Opposition fails to unite and support one single candidate, I was desperate. With Mikey Arroyo’s media suicide, I would not even consider any candidate affiliated with GMA. And that’s why I will put my vote on Noynoy.

Crazy reason, I know. But then again, I learned my lesson from 2004. If Erap insists on running again, I have no other option. Noynoy doesn’t have a platform as of now, and I’m just hoping that Mar Roxas would help him get his act together.

Moral vote be damned. The only advantage of a moral vote is that when the current administration screws up, I could easily claim that I didn’t choose him or her.